I’ve been slow to warm up to twitter.  In fact, I got an account before I came to WVU and proceeded to not tweet for at least a year.  I still don’t feel that I understand it well enough to make any good use of it.  Still, some judgements on Twitter’s effects seem misguided.

“I Tweet, Therefore I Am” suggests that Twitter takes us out of the moment because we’re too interested in sharing our experiences with others and how we can pack our feelings into 140 characters.  I disagree.  Before Twitter, weren’t we trying to pack things into Facebook statuses?  Blog posts?  Text messages?  And don’t we always, during a fun experience, think “I’ve got to tell this story to so-and-so.”?

The author says that our Twitter-induced self-consciousness is unnatural.  But it seems that community is such a powerful natural force in our psyche that Twitter is just the natural way to expand our community across the web.  The author also cites a study from 1950, which shows the American character becoming less inner-directed and more outer.  This still, to me, seems iffy.  The transcendentalists, whom I would consider to be more inner-directed than anyone ever needs to be, withdrawing from society and whatnot, still felt compelled to share their experiences with others.  Thoreau’s “Walden” is, in effect, the ultimate LiveJournal post.

As far as Twitter making life a performance, I see nothing wrong with that.  Nor do I see it as a decline in our introspective abilities.  As a performer, I rarely find myself more self-aware than when I’m on stage.  The inner-directed life seems totally compatible with the a life of tweeting and performing for our followers.